VOICE OF THE PEOPLE (letter).

Bush must go

September 11, 2003|By David Michaelson.

Brooklyn, N.Y. — On Sept. 11, 2001, I was sitting in my office in Manhattan. My wife was on her way to work, just under the World Trade Center. My daughter was at school in Brooklyn. I heard the planes crash. My wife met some of the first witnesses as they ran for the subway to escape. We saw the smoke--the toxic plume that wafted over my neighborhood, the one the Environmental Protection Agency assured us was safe.

I lost friends.

As the horror sunk in, I, like everyone else, turned to President Bush for leadership. Now, on the second anniversary, I reflect on the aftermath of Sept. 11.

I remember then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's leadership. I remember New York Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer's leadership. But Bush was in hiding. When he came out of hiding, he did attack the Al Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan, but oddly all he did was depose the Taliban. He never found Osama bin Laden. He never eliminated Al Qaeda in any of a hundred places they operate and train.

Then he abandoned Afghanistan, claiming that Iraq was the real enemy because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But now we learn Bush had no evidence of these weapons.

Then we learn his White House ordered the EPA to lie about the toxicity of the smoke cloud at the World Trade Center.

Bush uses Sept. 11 to justify every possible violation of the Constitution, yet the one thing he has failed to do is make America safer. He has failed New York and he has failed America since Sept. 11.

It is time to turn to new leadership, someone who will lead us against our enemies without lies, without sacrificing America's freedoms.